JD: A Novel - Hardcover

Merlis, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0299303500 ISBN 13: 9780299303501

Verlag: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

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Críticas:

"Both strands of Merlis' novel--Jonathan writing from the past, Martha speaking to us in the present--are vibrant, tense and alive. Merlis has written a profound book about sex and identity and family, about the perils of artistic ambition, about radical longing and the changing social fabric of America. JD is a beautiful novel."--Towle Road "Read JD as a suspense novel. . . . Read JD as a family saga, a page-turner of truth born from lies. Read it as commentary on the effects our past has on our future. Read it."--Bay Area Reporter "Yet again, Mark Merlis has written a deeply satisfying novel, one whose voices continue to echo in your head long after you've finished reading it. . . . It is a novel that weaves together the casualties of family and unaccepted sexual desires into a remarkable, if depressing, story of the U.S. in an era of huge social change."--Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide "Mark Merlis's beautifully controlled and heart-wrenching novel JD . . . is narrated by aging New York widow Martha Ascher, whose husband Jonathan died from a stroke shortly after their son Mickey was killed in Vietnam. Jonathan was a writer on the anarchist left who believed in 'an ecstatic blend of political and sexual liberation' and who spiced up his home life with nocturnal prowling for willing young men. . . . But the novel's tragedy lies in the relationship between Jonathan and Mickey, who meets his father's rebellion with a destructive kind of rebellion of his own. Mr. Merlis unravels Mickey's story with steely assurance and finely tempered prose. Like Martha, he is the victim of a man who 'preached an ideal he couldn't live up to.'"--Wall Street Journal "An important novel that masterfully evokes the tensions and social upheavals of the 1960s and sheds a fresh and highly insightful light on gay liberation, family life, and American masculinity."--Trebor Healey, author of A Horse Named Sorrow and Faun "Powered by stunning emotional, intellectual, and erotic complexities, JD is a trenchant portrait of a marriage and its heartbreaking casualties and, at the same time, something far more ambitious: a disquieting meditation on how and why America's best hopes went so stupendously awry during the 1960s and early 1970s. What emerges is an angry, loving hymn to a generation's failure to create the world we so passionately believed we longed for. There is no better novelist at work in our troubled country right now than Mark Merlis."--Paul Russell, author of The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov "This is vintage Merlis: historical yet timely, intellectually rich, bracingly witty, unnervingly erotic, and, finally, deeply tender and affecting."--Michael Lowenthal, author of The Paternity Test and Charity Girl "An amazing novel: beautifully written, ingeniously structured, involving and dangerous. The two narrative voices here, a wife and a husband, are perfectly realized. Martha in particular is a remarkable character--I've never read anyone like her in American fiction. This is a chamber drama about one family, yet it's full of windows that look out on the wider worlds of the Vietnam War, New York literary politics, and the gay revolution. Mark Merlis is a major writer and this is his best novel yet."--Christopher Bram, author of Eminent Outlaws and Gods and Monsters

Reseña del editor:

Dashingly told and meticulously researched, this double biography of D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen is the first to draw fully on Frieda s unpublished letters and on interviews with people who knew her well. It explores their collision with an industrial world they hated and chronicles the stormy relationship between husband and wife. The strong sexual vitality that inspired Lawrence s art brought both joy and anguish to his marriage. Here, the Lawrences emerge as proud but not conceited in their unconventional lives, staunch in the face of fierce opposition from a conformist society.
Living at the Edge follows the separate lives of Lawrence and Frieda up to their first meeting in 1912. Tracing their new life together, it depicts their grateful escape from the English Midlands; their discovery of exotic places where they made temporary homes Italy, Cornwall, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico; Lawrence s courageous battle against illness; and, after his death in 1930, Frieda s success in recreating the simple life on ranches near Taos, New Mexico, where she died in 1956.
At the center of their story is Lawrence s literary career. Biographers Squires and Talbot see Lawrence s major novels The Rainbow, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley s Lover as a fresh way to understand his turbulent and conflicted life. They reveal the extreme care with which he rewrote his personal experience to satisfy his deepest needs, and they introduce the many influential people who entered the Lawrences lives and work. The rich materials from Frieda s letters reveal a different Lawrence more difficult as a man but more interesting as an artist; they also reveal a different Frieda more vibrant as a woman, more substantial as a companion. This superb biography gives both Lawrence and Frieda striking new dimensions."

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: University of Wisconsin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0299303500
• ISBN 13: 9780299303501
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272